Integrating Instructional Design and Hypermedia Design

The impact of new technologies in education has brought to the perception that educational Web sites have a more or less standard features in several contexts. Yet, an analysis of the existing literature reveals that the practices of Instructional Design and Hypermedia Design have few if any contact points. We claim that an integration of the two processes – namely learning activities design and hypermedia design – would bring benefits in term of efficiency and effectiveness of the development process and quality of the final application. As a first step in this direction, we propose a general framework that integrates the existing approaches adopted in Instructional Design and Hypermedia Development for both design and requirements analysis. Introduction The new wave of eLearning has brought to a deeper and deeper integration of technologies in education. Educational Web sites have become an almost standard feature of a large part of Higher Education courses (Harasim, Hiltz, Turoff, & Teles, 1995): they are used for simple learning materials delivery (the syllabus, lecture slides, readings and assignments), as shared learning space (for group work, interaction with the instructor or the tutor, or discussion forum) or for more structured activit ies such as WebQuests (Dodge, 2003). Educational Web sites and applications could be classified as a specific type of hypermedia products, yet the development of the learning activity and of the educational hypermedia to support it are usually not integrated into a unique process. The two disciplines of Instructional Design (ID) and Hypermedia Design (HD) actually lack a shared model, although they both recognize the overlap of at least a part of their practice. The main goal of this paper is promoting discussion on this topic, and advance the claim that integrating the two design processes in a unifying framework would lead to enhanced results, better quality products, and reduction of development time and costs. The framework we propose, developed on the basis of existing literature, also includes the integration of the analysis phase of Instructional Design and requirements process carried on in the very early stage of hypermedia development. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section two will provide some background in Instructional Design and Hypermedia Design, trying to emphasize commonalities and shared understandings. Section three presents our framework. Section four draws the conclusions and outline the future steps of our work.